Book Information: Lady of the Evening Faces

The story's title alludes to one of the heroines of The Tale of Genji whose delicate, passive, fragile beauty is compated to a flower known as the "evening face," a kind of moonflower. Like that flower, which opens for just a couple hours in the evening, the coy noblewoman dies after a fleeting love affair with Prince Gengi. Her daughter, however, is stronger and survives the hardships of a motherless childhood until finally she comes under the prince's protection. Hiraiwa's story focuses more on the daughter; when it begins, the mother is already dead and the daughter is preparing for her hundredth-day memorial service (the common practice in Japan is to comemorate a person's death every seventh day for seven weeks after the funeral, followed by the hundredth-day service.)